After tracing the Microcosmic Orbit, I began exploring the broader network of energy lines—the Macrocosmic Orbit – mapping the energy nodes along its path. What started as a simple extension of attention soon revealed a far more complex geometry, with multiple nodes forming rings around the body. This is a personal account of how I had to redraw the traditional maps to fit my experience.
Choosing the Focus Points in Arms and Legs
Once the Macrocosmic Orbit opened, I used the same approach that worked with the Microcosmic Orbit: moving my attention along the lines and mapping the energy nodes where the sensation naturally strengthened.
The choice of focus points was straightforward in the head and torso. I used nodes at the same heights as those in the Microcosmic Orbit. Now, instead of two nodes at each level, there were eight.
I had no references for where to focus my attention in the arms, so I chose levels that roughly corresponded to those in the torso: Shoulders aligned with Vishuddha, mid–upper arms with Anahata, elbows with Manipura 2 (diaphragm), mid–forearms with Manipura 1 (navel), wrists with Swadhisthana and fingers with Muladhara. For the legs, I chose similar locations: where they join the torso, mid-thighs, knees, mid-calves, ankles, and toes.
A System of Rings Instead of Single Chakras
Overall, this created a system of 15 distinct levels from toes to crown. I would consider each level a genuine “chakra,” with the crucial difference that it wasn’t a single node at the spine, as described in many Buddhist texts, but a ring of eight nodes (or even sixteen from perineum to shoulders, if including the arm nodes).
The figures show the approximate location of each line and node: Du Mai and Ren Mai in yellow, the lateral lines in blue, the front-left and front-right lines in green, and the back-left and back-right lines in red.
The connecting lines are meant only to illustrate the grid-like structure; they do not imply that the sensation must move sequentially from one node to the next. Attention can jump between non-adjacent nodes—something I did routinely long before I discovered the two uncharted chakras at the base of the tongue and the nose.
Naturally, this map reflects my own estimation of where to place attention along the pathways that revealed themselves when the Macrocosmic Orbit opened. It worked for me, but other approaches might have led to similar results. With hindsight, and considering how the sensation evolved, I would say that moving attention—and therefore the sensation—from one point to another is not a ritual in which order or exact location are crucial. The principle behind the orbit is simply to train the neural circuitry so the sensation can spread throughout the whole body, until the different nodes eventually merge into a single field.
Orbits are highly efficient because they train each region in turn, reducing the risk of leaving blind spots that later appear as obstructions when the energy attempts to permeate the entire body.
The Role of the Tongue
Furthermore, the Ren Mai had two branches: one at the tongue and one at the penis. I had read in several Daoist texts that the Du Mai runs up from the tailbone to the head and down to the base of the nose, while the Ren Mai ends at the base of the tongue. These texts instruct the practitioner to place the tip of the tongue against the upper gums or soft palate to “close the circuit,” supposedly interrupted by the mouth.
In practice, however, once I discovered the two uncharted nodes in this area, the sensation moved freely through the chin. Therefore, I did not use the tongue bridge and instead understood the Du Mai as running from the tailbone to the upper back of the head, and the Ren Mai from the upper front of the head to the perineum, including the two branches.
This is not to say the tongue is irrelevant—it required careful attention at a later stage. As happens with the penis, it is a very good conductor of the sensation. In Tantric sex, the feeling clearly flowed from the branching point at the perineum through the two nodes at the base and the tip, and moreover, when the tip touched the cervix it was like closing a circuit—the feeling flowed with remarkable intensity from my body to my partner’s and vice versa, suggesting some form of communication between our nervous systems that did not rely on direct synaptic contact.
The same happens with the tongue: the sensation passes from the tip to the gums when they make contact. And, to add another similarity, the tongue feels swollen when the sensation flows through it.
The Map and the Territory
This map is not a prescription. It reflects one practitioner’s attempt to navigate a territory that resists standardization. What mattered was not the exact location of each node, but the gradual emergence of a system — one that trained the neural circuitry until the sensation could spread freely, without gaps or obstructions. The geometry of rings was a scaffold, not a destination.
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